Nancy Clark Update V

No, we're not letting this go.  There's reason not to, which we'll get to, below.

If you are new to CFR and are scratching your head in confusion, please review our earlier Nancy Clark entries here,here,here and here.

I have three new links that add to the discussion about this issue.

First up, award-winning Iowa sportswriter Ronald Wesley Maly, responds to an reader email about Nancy Clark.

The gist---the internet message boards, recruiting websites and blogs are killing the newspapers in the content wars.  Some newspaper sports departments may be feeling the crunch.  Perhaps this is motivation for Ms. Clark's ourburst against the blogs.

Next up, blogger Pete Holiday shreds Ms. Clark and her editors.  I mean badly.  The entry is a little too long to reproduce here, but is still a quick read.  Please read that link if you do nothing else reading this.

The gist---Ms. Clark's editors let her publish the attack piece, condemning bloggers for introducing error into a debate, and then with their freudian faux pas veracity/voracity moment, themselves introduced error into their story about error.

Blogs are useful because they can swiftly correct errors through reader comment sections.  Newspapers often have to wait until the next day and then "post a small retraction on page G32 in a 4 point font".  So true.

Then, the big one.  Ms. Clark failed to identify individual bloggers and Holiday smells a smoking gun, calling her scared and saying it's probably because she knows there are many blogs who know more about what's going on.

Nice work, Pete.

Lastly, we arrive at Iowa blogger State 29.  They find *New* information on this story that gives it continued life.

It appears her blogger-bashing piece has been removed.  The proof (as of 8/22/2005).  It's even been deleted from various search engine caches.

Figures.

State 29 speculates this has to do with the poor fact-checking done in regards to naming the individual blogs in both her now stricken piece and follow-up interview with EDSBS.

Obviously, Ms Clark's attempts to smear bloggers wasn't verified, wasn't scrutinized by editors, wasn't fact-checked and proofed.

I don't live in Iowa and thus don't have a hard copy of recent Des Moines Register newspapers but I'm curious if there has been any kind of retraction/correction (hopefully the mea culpa, laundry-list length type) concerning Ms. Clark's flagrant piece beyond the initial voracity/veracity oops.  I doubt it.

State 29 was crafty enough to find a copy of Ms. Clark's original story, reproduced on her site.  We'll also save it on here, probably in our "Files" section in a word document soon.

Wow what a turn of events.

The Des Moines Register website folks cannot claim in defense that there is regular removal of old stories because another anti-blog story here by Ken Fuson dated March 28, 2005, has not been removed.

Curious, no?

Finally, we will correct ourselves a bit from our last entry about this.  We criticized Ms. Clark for the delay between when she was contacted by the EDSBS.com guys and when they could meet for an interview.  They responded in our comment forum to let us know that the delay worked both ways, as they also were busy and not able to schedule a more immediate interview.

Fair enough.

Update on Monday, August 22, 2005 at 10:45PM by CFR

We have copied from the State 29 blog Nancy Clark's original anti-blog story.

You can now find it, as a Microsoft Word document, in our Files section at CFR.

Update on Tuesday, August 23, 2005 at 11:53AM by CFR

Fresh linkage blogger The Sparky Chronicles, a journalist himself, emailed us his take on the bloggers vs. journalists ongoing rift.

Sensible, if detached response.  But he wasn't responding so much to Nancy Clark but a more general feeling of what's going on.